A L S O__T O D A Y [ 2 1 S T ] The president as lab rat By Gary Wolf How much surveillance can one human being take? President Clinton is helping us find out [ F E A T U R E ] Talking head By Virginia Vitzthum The hand-wringing over the Starr Report proves that Beltway pundits have a harder time getting a grip on a certain sexual practice than the American people do

The Dark Hotel ____A preview of Salon's noir comics serial - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY GARY KAMIYA | The Dark Hotel is one of the strangest residential hotels in the United States. Since its founding in 1893 by ex-slave Elfro Jefferson (who later became California's first black millionaire), the Dark Hotel has been a purgatorial way station for an endless procession of artists, grifters, adventuresses, down-on-their-luck visionaries and criminals of various stripes. Haunted by a long series of unsolved violent crimes and graced by the presence of legendary artists, the Dark Hotel is, in Fodor's somewhat overheated words, "perhaps the most glamorous -- and least reputable -- of all the decrepit Bohemian waystations that sprang up like gaudy flowers in the moral muck of the City by the Bay." Today, Bob Callahan and Spain Rodriguez, chroniclers extraordinaire of the Dark Hotel, offer Salon readers a sneak peek into the peculiar goings-on in one of its shadier rooms. And next Friday, the Hotel officially opens its doors. The sheets may be yellow and the shower rusty, but you can cut the atmosphere with a switchblade. And by standing on the cigarette-scarred chairs in their musty rooms, guests can observe three highly unusual destinies unfold. Behind the door of Room 37 sits one William Sternelli, a good man whose mind has been unraveled by love and involuntary ingestion of experimental drugs. This tale, "The Manchurian Experiment," is artistically rendered by Spain Rodriguez, Zap Comix legend, and written by Bob Callahan, who created, with Art Spiegelman, the noir literary comic series Neon Lit. Down the hall in Room 17, Dorothy Never, a still-devoted follower of the hysterical faux-Nietzschean philosopher Anna Granite, waits for a mysterious interview that will change her life. The art in "At the Pinnacle" is by another great name in the comics underground, Justin Green. The text, adapted from Mary Gaitskill's novel "Two Girls Fat and Thin," is by Bob Callahan. And finally, in Room 28, the late William S. Burroughs has begun appearing to the room's inhabitant, Tony Pasolini, in his nightly dreams. Callahan wrote "The Night Sky"; the artist is the extraordinary Paul Mavrides. And now, the night clerk, Drago Drugilovic, awaits you at the registration desk. You don't want to keep Drago waiting, especially when he's gotten into the slivovitz. SALON | Sept. 25, 1998 E N T E R > > - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY SPAIN RODRIGUEZ